A Quarto Page Layout Example

Inspired by Tufte Handout, Using Quarto

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1 Introduction

This document demonstrates the use of a number of advanced page layout features to produce an attractive and usable document inspired by the Tufte handout style and the use of Tufte’s styles in RMarkdown documents [@xie2018]. The Tufte handout style is a style that Edward Tufte uses in his books and handouts. Tufte’s style is known for its extensive use of sidenotes, tight integration of graphics with text, and well-set typography. Quarto1 supports most of the layout techniques that are used in the Tufte handout style for both HTML and LaTeX/PDF output.

1 To learn more, you can read more about Quarto or visit Quarto’s Github repository.

---
title: "An Example Using the Tufte Style"
author: "John Smith"
format:
  html:
    grid:
1      margin-width: 350px
  pdf: default
2reference-location: margin
citation-location: margin
---
1
Increases the width of the margin to make more room for sidenotes and margin figures (HTML only).
2
Places footnotes and cited sources in the margin. Other layout options (for example placing a figure in the margin) will be set per element in examples below.

These layout features are designed with two important goals in mind:

  1. To produce both PDF and HTML output with similar styles from the same Quarto document;
  2. To provide simple syntax to write elements of the Tufte style such as side notes and margin figures. If you’d like a figure placed in the margin, just set the option fig-column: margin for your code chunk, and we will take care of the details for you[^2].
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